Another teacher employs a more formal approach, incorporating phonics instruction. One teacher is a veteran of the Bay Area Writing Project, the origination of the now-famous National Writing Project, and has shaped her classroom into a Nancie Atwell-style workshop. This becomes one of the explicit takeaways that Ladson-Billings offers: it takes time to develop into a master teacher.Īlthough each of these educators seems to have a different style, each of these styles seems to be the product of a great deal of inquiry, and to be explicitly tailored toward student learning. The least experienced teacher that Ladson-Billings profiles has 12 years of experience. In fact, even though this book was written before the advent of TFA, Ladson-Billings’s work does offer an implicit critique of this model. There was none of the glorification of the “hero” teacher, the white savior marched in from the Ivy League to improve the lives of inner city black children. The first commonality that I noticed was that all of the teachers were career educators working in regular public schools. The book’s main thesis is that, while there is not necessarily a single “right” way to improve student achievement, there are important commonalities among the ten or so teachers’s approaches that Ladson-Billings profiles. This book takes as its aim a focus on teachers who have success with African American children.
I’ll skip the book’s background and just say that I have been intrigued by culturally relevant / responsive / sustaining pedagogy for a few years now, and as always, I wanted to go back to the source, which Ladson-Billings, and especially this book, are.
At just 156 pages (minus a second-edition afterward, and a lengthy appendix), it’s not long, and it’s also written in that hard-to-achieve balance between academically authoritative and literate / accessible. This is a classic, and I really enjoyed it. Book: The Dreamkeepers, by Gloria Ladson-Billings
0 kommentar(er)
